An Anthology of Sport
The Lonsdale Anthology of Sporting Prose and Verse. Com- piled by Eric Parker. (Seeley, Service and Co. 10s. 13d.) ANTHOLOGIES are very much in the vogue at the present moment. They afford an attractive but at the same time a somewhat tantalizing form of reading. It is not merely that the reader is apt to think that he could have made a better selection than the compiler ; that is perhaps inevitable, and it is safe to assume that, in nine cases out of ten, the reader is wholly mistaken. It is rather that the very passages which appeal most to us—and they will vary, of course, with every individual reader—leave us, not exactly with a sense of dis- appointment, but with an appetite whetted rather than satis- fied. A dip into a once favourite author, perhaps neglected for many years,. stimulates the desire for a deeper draught from the well. A single extract, a single episode, is not enough. We want more ; we want the whole book, or the whole chapter, to browse about at will, to track down passage after passage that comes floating back to the memory, to seek out all the old nooks and corners in which we once delighted to linger.
Mr. Eric Parker, the compiler of the volume under review, has exercised his selective powers with laudable discretion. The book contains a number of excellent pieces, familiar and otherwise. To hear Mr. Jorrocks once more addressing his " beloved 'eaters " : to watch Mr. Winkle (for the how- manieth time ?) perform his " swan-like " evolutions upon the ice : all that is unalloyed delight. Yet the general effect of the book is somehow unsatisfying. It suggests a doubt that will be regarded in many quarters as savouring of the rankest heresy. Does the subject of sport—let us put the question as bluntly as possible—lend itself to effective literary treatment ? He would be a bold man who ventured to answer the question with a decisive negative, but one has an uneasy feeling that he would not be altogether in the wrong. Sport lives in the action of the moment ; its sensations are too fleeting, its emotions too transient, to bear the cold light of permanent record. As the actors say, it is difficult to " get across." And most difficult of all when the aid of the Muse is invoked. Sporting prose may be tolerable, but sporting verse ... ? How much of it, when all is said and done, and all allowances made, was really worth writing or is worth preserving ? There is the time-honoured example of Pindar, we shall be told. But Pindar, as a sporting writer, is a transparent fraud ; his panting athletes were nothing to him ; they were a mere excuse, a mere peg on which to hang his mythological rhap- sodies. No, it is no use quoting Pindar : what he said (like Mr. Weller's reference to the soldier) is " not evidence."
Of the different sections of Mr. Parker's anthology those dealing with Boxing and Angling deserve to be placed first. They are fortunate in their authors, for Walton and Borrow adapt themselves more readily than most other writers to the selector's art. In the Boxing section, it may be noted in passing, the editor's usual accuracy for once fails him ; a famous passage from Romany Rye, describing the discomfiture of a bullying coachman in an inn yard, is ascribed by a curious oversight (which is repeated in the Table of Contents) to Hazlitt's Essays. The hunting extracts are a little disappoint- ing, but on the whole field sports come off better than games with the ball. Descriptions of golf, even in the expert hands of Mr. Bernard Darwin, are wearisome to the uninitiated. Football is better to play—or to watch—than to write about.
The cricket section is not particularly interesting, and it if difficult not to feet that a better choice might have been made. Cobden's famous over was a heroic feat, but it drags a little in the telling ; it is a small point, but the story would get on better without the redundant " Mr." so constantly prefixed to the names of the players. Tom Brown's last match —with every apology to Rugbeians past, present and to come —really will not do at all. Let us speak with due respect of Tom Brown. He is the classic schoolboy hero, the embodi- ment of all the virtues that our grandfathers associated with "muscular Christianity." So be it; but he was scandalously inefficient as Captain of the School Cricket XI. Scandal- ously inefficient—let there be no mincing of words. Who but a scandalously inefficient captain would have altered his batting order against his own judgement, at the crisis of the match, in deference to a noisy deputation from the spectators ; or would have admitted—openly admitted— that he had put a friend into the XI, not on his merits as a player, but because " it will do him so much good, and you can't think what I owe him " ? He deserved to lose every match he ever played. We turn with relief to the portrait of F. R. Spofforth, "his face set in hard, predatory lines . . . a stark man that let in with him the coldest blast of antas
gonism that ever blew over a June field." J. E. S.
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